Since I can remember, I have loved. I have loved deeply and without reason. But over and over, in this endless cycle of learning I have allowed fears to be imposed upon the way I love. And so love has been hurtful. People around me, in their effort to help me, have told me countless times to “forget about him”, “get over him” or “you’re too good for him anyways!” and so… I have listened to them and repeated those things to myself until I believed it too. And that’s how I came to live the most painful lie of all: to live as if I didn’t love, as if I didn’t love myself. Instead of seeing every rejection as a place in me that I needed to nurture with my own love, I mistakenly saw it as an unlovable dark spot forever deprived of light.

Until… it hurt too much too handle. Because, somewhere inside of me, I knew that regardless of the rejections, the conflicts or distances- it never meant the love wasn’t there. And neither did it mean that I wasn’t entitled to still love the way I felt I really did. This immense gift of loving through it all, was something I desperately began to protect myself from thinking IT was the cause of all my pain. Little did I know it was just that mindset that caused me to hurt the most…

The biggest mistake us humans do is to deem it wrong to love. The greatest pain we can inflict upon others and ourselves is done by holding back the love we have and are. It is so simple really. Everything that we are is energy in vibration and that energy is set in motion thanks to the gravitational pull we call love. Love creates motion, which causes emotion and in turn that is what stirs the process of evolution.

It is so simple really. And all this time, everything we’ve ever done wrong, has always been about undermining love. As soon as we forget about it, shut it out or restrict it in one way or another… things become complicated.

And it hurts. But that’s not always a bad thing, because we tend to learn a lot from the pain and the complicated as well. But at some point we must realize that what we are to truly learn isn’t all that complicated. It’s love. We are to learn about love. I’ve realized it over and over again but somehow I needed some more homework and made things complicated for myself anyways. And so, with every time I have fallen head over heals or simply felt a strong pull towards someone, the thing that has hurt me the most is that persistent thought of “I shouldn’t” or “I can’t”. That stubborn little thing we call fear that springs right from that (not always so) amazing ability to think critically.

Whenever we tell ourselves such things, we build a fort around our precious love and we become very lonely and thus more or less miserable. And then, everything becomes about defending those walls, keeping us busy, getting over it and blablabla. No. I will not settle for a life of distraction. I’m way too sensitive to survive such masochism anyways. For me, it’s beyond the point of choosing. If I am to continue living, I must also be free to love. And I mean love. Really love. I mean no boundaries, like love really is.

I can’t say I won’t do this or I won’t do that because love- the universal law that rules me- does not work that way. We have the ability to rationalize and rationalize but with this gift of the mind we can only go so far. It is only with the force of love that we may go beyond the limits that our rationality perceives. It is our lesson to learn to expand beyond the boundaries we have set up for ourselves. We must see the imprisonment of our emotions that is inhibiting us from being free individuals in a limitless united collectivity. Once we expand with love we will see there are no rules.

We may have needed moral codes and rational social control back when we hadn’t yet evolved so far in our ability to love, but now that we have- the next step must be to move beyond those codes and restraints. We can trust ourselves to be free if we live in accordance with love. Hurt and pain only derives from depriving ourselves of the right to be happy and free. Happiness is just another word to describe what happens when we let go of our fears, of our inhibitions. Happiness is when we choose to be free to exercise love. Isn’t that a human right? Isn’t that all that history seems to have taught us? That love conquers all? That we all have the right to love freely? No matter the circumstances? No matter what the mind fears might happen or deems inappropriate?

We must love and we must love freely. It is really about time we rid ourselves of our self-inflicted pain and constraints and about time we opened our hearts to the infinite amount of love that is accessible to us. About time we began to exercise that love without trying to control it. I once wrote, in a state of gut-wrenching heart ache over a secret crush, that love is like a wild horse, tormenting and terrifying when in captivity, but when it is freed, galloping majestically across a limitless open field… that is when it is truly home. And with lessons taught over and over, I have learned this one thing: the ultimate declaration of love to myself is to set myself free. And whatever thatmeans, I am ready to find out.

Can this really be? For centuries and more they hunted you down and punished you for your truth and your magical mystery. Now suddenly they seem to ask for it. They don’t fear you. They beg and plead for you to help them. They once called you a witch, chained you down, burnt you and tossed you down a cliff to see if you would fly.

Well now you do and there they are, watching you in awe as you rise like a phoenix from the ashes of their primeval cursed fires. All along they blamed you for witchcraft and black magic when all along it was them whom used the dark forces to torture your bright soul. Your body and mind may have died over and over but your spirit persisted and here you are again, blooming, as bright as ever. The courage you have had over lifetimes is ineffable, beyond grasping and spectacularly baffling. You have withstood so much and yet you have kept coming back. You have trusted defeat to be the beginning of victory and therefor you have been resilient. Your strength is unlike many.

The memories of your past battles stretching far back in history of mankind are imprinted in your body and today you can honor them. Today you can reveal yourself and give thanks to the courage you have showed lifetimes again and again. You have fought long and hard and beginning to see that you can finally put your sword down knowing that you mustn’t always be on guard. You have made it safely to this point in time and space and here you can finally reside in peace. You were a warrior, a princess with a blade sharpened by love. You were a healer, a goddess with hands of light. You were a speaker with a quick tongue perfected for wisdoms of the heart. Now you are all those things you ever were, just not chased and imprisoned for it. Now you are a free bird, wings spreading high and wide.

For long your roots have carved their way deep into the soil of this earth and finally the flower is in full bloom with no end in sight. Honor the wars of the past and rejoice in the peace of today. You are deserving of the goodness that is given to you at this present time, for you have fought heroically and ceaselessly. These are times of laughter, but unlike previous times these laughs will not slit you throat. As you laugh today all the wounds of your past battles are healing and finding their peace inside your everlasting soul. Like a soldier home from war, it is sometimes hard to understand that the combat is truly over. But it is time you see that you are in fact coming home and that everyone who ever saw your light and laid a hand upon you is now cheering you on, welcoming you to rest in happiness and develop freely from now on.

No one is here to hold you back anymore, and even if that is a good thing it can be a terrifying thought for one whose wings were cut by countless hateful hands. But don’t be alarmed. There is really nothing to fear and such is the truth today. It wasn’t always so but today it is and so you must accept that, just as you once accepted to fight your way through the storms. Today you have clear blue skies and a light breeze pushing you forward on your journey.

The sun shines bright upon your face and the moon pulls you wherever you need to be. She, the moon, has watched you in your darkest hours and seen you swivel your sword and stain your hands with the blood of those whom once tried to stop you. But she has also seen your grace and your caring ways when no one else could see. She, the moon, asks you to forgive yourself just as she has long ago. Him, the sun, shows you the brightness of your being and asks you not to hold it back. Rains have watered the earth and your feet have danced upon it with grace no matter what. You are the one you’ve always been, whom you’ve been punished and feared for, worshiped and loved for and whom you are now free to be. In this life you are truly unlimited. In this life you are free.

How can I share with you my happiness from the sheer being alive? How can I explain to you the pleasure produced from a simple stroke on my skin? How can I catch you in your busy life and get you to see the immense gratification found in just sitting still? How can I begin to convey the beauty that can be discovered in watching anything, literally anything, move in its constant flowing dance? How can I possibly communicate to your busy mind the peacefulness of absolute silence? How can I meet you right here, right now and have us unfold the magnificence of this moment together when your thoughts have wondered off far away in time and space?

From where I stand today I see that madness was something I inherited from our culture. Even though our culture claims normality and points toward me being an odd exception, I feel I have finally grown sane. Out of this chaos that is the way society’s wheel spins, grew in me first weariness then suspicion then curiosity and finally some form of sanity. And so, suddenly I found myself outside of the matrix, seeing things much more objectively rather than the way I was taught to perceive them. And so here I am, watching that wheel spin and spin out of control, with so many of you so desperately caught in it that you might haven’t even noticed the way it continuously whirls you out of your own center.

So I ask myself, what can I do? I cannot grab your hand and pull you out. I cannot force you to look at things my way. I cannot make you enjoy watching another person in the eye as much as or even more than buying fancy new things. I cannot command you to laugh at the challenges you face. Only you can do such things for yourself, if you want to that is. Only you can choose the ways in which you want your path to wind, but as long as you don’t know this wholeheartedly your path will most likely be the one paved out for you by society. And such a path is seldom in full accord with the way your heart wants you to move.

No, all I can do is stay here and wave from the outside hoping that you’ll notice me, and see that there is in fact a place beyond the platform of time and space that you once were restricted to move within that you may have overlooked. And if you do notice it, all I can do is- with full honesty and confidence, lead by example and express the abundant infinity, which can be found here. And if you do trust me, and most of all trust yourself in what you come to believe, I can only mirror the courage that you too hold to decisively take the leap of faith that is essential to the full uncovering of what has been veiled. And if you do pursue that leap of faith, with arms, mind and heart open, I will be sure to greet you here the same precise way, with arms, mind and heart open.

For an exaggeratedly long time now I have been afraid of being too much. I’ve been afraid of expressing all of me and not being understood, of being rejected for my truth. I wasn’t always aware of this lingering fear of mine since it came in disguise, in subtle ways making me compromise who I was, making me a more edited, cropped and censored version of myself, both physically and in character. It has made me silent when I felt the urge to speak and made me speak when I would rather just have stayed silent. It has made me feed my absorbed insecurities rather than boost my inborn self-confidence. It has made me listen to others when I should have listened to myself just as it has made me full of myself, deaf and stubborn, when I should’ve listened to others. So here is me embarking and completing the journey of stripping myself of this fear to become who I am.

One would think it seems obvious that we should all simply be who we are but the harsh reality of it is that this fear of simply being is one that persists in most of us, sometimes even all the way to the grave. This I refuse. Now that I’ve began acknowledging this fear it seems more and more irrational for me to continue putting in such immense effort in order to be less of myself. In hindsight I think it was the conscious choice to be more of myself that aggravated things and set the war in motion; the opposing forces within me made the state of things unsustainable and I was brought to some sort of breaking point. It is no wonder that I’ve been exhausted, pumped out of all energy with nothing left to do anything that does not contribute to the resolution of the inner conflict. I have been so busy draining myself of vitality that adding a single thing to my list of burdens, however light they might have seen, would have caused me to crumble. It’s not that I’m week and nor do I carry more than anyone else, quite contradictory I am strong and I refrain from carrying more than what lays within my direct span of responsibilities. It is rather, fortunately so (though it might seem unfortunate to the outsider at first glance) that circumstances have led me to evolve in such a way that I have been forced to prioritize. I have been pushed to truly and wisely pick my battles, or more accurately: pick my battle.

And so, as I have been brave enough (because most of us know it truly does take courage) to go into this most crucial of battles, the one between who I am and who am not- yet who I have tried foolishly hard to be, I am gladly seeing the dawn of a ceasefire on the horizon. I realize now that ‘who I am not’ stands little to no chance at all at winning this battle of battles because, regardless of how fearful I might have been, there seems to be little to nothing at all that can possibly stop ‘who I am’ from winning this battle of battles. ‘Who I am not’ is slowly giving in more and more willingly, beat from trying to impose itself on a pure force of nature. As it turns out, ‘who I am not’ has been waiting for me give it some sort of sign that it is allowed to give up…

They say that it isn’t the darkness within that scares us the most but really our inner light that brings us most fright. Today I know this for a fact… just as I know that fear is something to be faced. So when fear has the upper hand, making us shiver from the mere thought of moving into it, let us think of it this way: facing the significant fear of truly embracing and embodying who we are really means to face, embrace and embody a pure being of light and love. Now, how scary can that really be if we don’t even think too much about it but simply feel it? Doesn’t feel too bad does it? Yet I’ve still been (and I know I’m not the only one) scared shitless to really encounter and accept this person that I am, intrinsically good and beautiful! Why? Because in some twisted way my conditioned mind had me thinking I would be too much if I didn’t hold back.

We live in a world where almost everyone does this automatically to themselves and so we too grow to learn to do the same. We dim our light and we cover up the most raw and pure bits of our being. All this as a desperate yet understandable attempt at being loved, though ironically when we do so we tell ourselves that we are not loveable just as we are. We send signals to ourselves and others that only once we are a little less of who we are and a little more of who we are not we can maybe be loved fully. Stupid isn’t it? Yes it is stupid because it is a lie, and it is a lie I’ve been longing to bust not merely in theory but also in practice. So as I am acknowledging, embracing and growing into the fullness of me, I intend to bust this lie. I am proving to both myself and others that I am loveable just as I am- uncensored and undimmed. Belittling and distorting myself further is but an act that I am growing weary of putting on.

Suddenly, being too much doesn’t seem so scary anymore because if I can still love myself untamed and raw, I need not worry of much else. Suddenly my eyes are open to see the beauty in the pure and honest being in others as well as in myself. And following, suddenly my heart is inviting to be loved wholly by others in return. So first, I’d like to thank ‘who I am not’ for putting up such tough resistance, making the winner even more worthy than it might otherwise have been. But most of all I’d like to thank the champion of this battle of battles.

I strongly believe that we as humans have the means to denounce the structure that we our selves and our ancestors have set up. We can stop complying with the structural violence that is imposed upon us through the constant feed of a constructed and corrupted value system, which only serves to limit the individual’s freedom.

Some may claim that even if you try to change a system or if you try to escape from it you are actually still contributing to it in some way. I beg to differ. Today in class we discussed whether joining the “do-what-you-love”-movement is just another way of conforming to the ruling institutions or not. Scarily enough, the majority we’re inclined to propose that there was in fact no way of fully escaping from being a result of the system and I decided that there must be a way, even in academic terms, to disprove their arguments.

I think it is more about how we choose to do things rather than what we do that will be the key in ceasing to co-create immoral value systems where we allow some to be the benefiters of it and a majority to be excluded from it. I am not trying to make a political statement, in fact I am deliberately stepping away from any political standpoint because I believe the political system is just such a system that exploits without actually seeing the people that it is supposed to serve, no matter what party or ideology it promotes.

Sure, if doing what you love means either becoming a size 0 model serving to help the media feed distorted pictures of bodies, then, of course you are inevitably (blindly or not) complying with a predefined corrupted social structure. And even if doing what you love means painting flowers on a canvass day in and day out without earning a sufficient income to live “comfortably” and thus doing this ultimately makes you miserable you are still upholding a set of values that were predetermined about what this supposed comfortable life should be like.

But suppose that doing what you love means doing what you love, the way you want to do it and actually loving it… Suppose the structure isn’t all there is, that beyond the structure there is a limitless immensity where, once you set foot there, all of your actions have the potential to be based on your consciously made decisions for the common good. Suppose that this never-ending field derives from your intuition and that your actions have the possibility to not be filtrated by the pollution of your influenced mind.

Beyond the socially created system that serves to sustain itself through power and authority there is a greater ecological system that thrives on unexpected deviations and transformations. Sure, we are creations of our circumstances and the world we’ve been born into but I believe there is a deeper level from where we spring and once we get back in touch with it, become aware and stop being blind to how we are constantly being influenced by authority we can make the social world we live in a means to achieve greater goals beyond the expectations of the structure.